Good morning,

Here’s what’s in today’s issue:

• One big thing. Who said anything about a midlife crisis? Why wellbeing naturally grows in midlife.

• You have to check this out. Life lessons from a loser and why life gets better after 50.

• Tools and tech. Mapping your life story.

Let’s jump in. 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The U-shaped curve of wellbeing.

Let’s start with a two-question quiz. Second Act Creator meets BuzzFeed.

Please answer two questions on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means 'completely dissatisfied' and 10 means 'completely satisfied':

1. How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?

2. How satisfied do you think you will be in five years?

Take a moment to consider your answer. You'll come up with two numbers. For example, right now, I am a ___, but I think I will feel like a ___ in five years.

Now, let’s zoom out:

• Think back to when you were 30. It’s impossible to do this objectively, but what do you think your two answers would have been when you were 30? ___ and ___

• Think ahead to being 70. This is just a prediction, but what do you think your two answers will be at 70? ___ and ___

What did you find?

How cool if you had written down answers to those two questions on your birthday every year. You could track how accurately you forecast life satisfaction.

What we do have, however, is that exact data from over 23,000 people. Participants aged 17-85 in the German Socio-Economic Panel answered the two questions above in waves over ten years, recording over 132,000 life satisfaction ratings and predictions.

What did researchers find when they compared the five-year predictions to the actual satisfaction levels five years later (for the same people)?  

People were bad at forecasting their own future life satisfaction.

But they weren’t consistently overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. Instead, their errors varied consistently based on age.

Let's step back before I tell you what this research revealed and why this was the case.

Flaws in forecasting the future.

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, this concept will be familiar. If you’re a new reader (Hey! Welcome!), let me explain.

In Rose-Colored Distortions, I talked about how your brain consistently deceives you by removing negative emotional experiences from your memories.

This is a well-documented phenomenon called rosy retrospection, a cognitive bias that causes you to remember the past more positively than you actually experienced it.

The following week, in Miswanting the Future, I described the extensive research that shows why we are also bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future.

Thinking about your future happiness is an act of imagination. You simulate a future world in your mind, and then predict how you will feel in that scenario.

For example, you might predict you will enjoy eating a slice of pizza on an upcoming trip to New York City. When you imagine eating that pizza in a week, you imagine having a fresh, hot pizza in a cozy setting, not a stale, cold pizza in a shop surrounded by customers watching videos on their phones without earbuds.

Things get trickier when your future forecasts are more consequential, such as getting a major promotion.

Psychologist Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar calls this phenomenon the arrival fallacy, which refers to the false belief that achieving a particular goal will lead to lasting happiness. This fallacy causes disappointment or an unexpected sense of emptiness (tied to not gaining the expected happiness).

So, how well do you think you can predict your future wellbeing?

For example, with question I started with today: How satisfied with life, all things considered, do you think you will be in five years?

The forecasting flaws of youth.

Let’s get back to the research.

What did researchers find when examining the five-year life satisfaction forecasts of over 23,000 Germans and comparing them with their current life satisfaction scores five years later?

Young people were consistently overly optimistic, expecting significant increases in life satisfaction over time.

“Young adults typically believe that they’ll ‘beat the average’ — that they’ll be the lucky ones who end up with a top job, a happy marriage, and healthy children,” says Hannes Schwandt.

This is not surprising. It also makes evolutionary sense.

“Humans expect positive events in the future even when there is no evidence to support such expectations. For example, people expect to live longer and be healthier than average, they underestimate their likelihood of getting a divorce, and overestimate their prospects for success on the job market,” neuroscientists believe.

This is called optimism bias.

The German research reveals that being overly optimistic is an affliction of the young when it comes to forecasting future life satisfaction.

These overly optimistic forecasting errors peak at age 23 but persist well into our 50s.

What is the consequence of these overly optimistic errors? Disappointment.

“As we age, things often don’t turn out as nicely as we planned. We may not climb up the career ladder as quickly as we wished. Or we do, only to find that prestige and a high income are not as satisfying as we expected them to be,” says Schwandt.

In midlife, disappointment that life didn’t work out as planned coincides with the chilly realization that life is short. We naturally begin to lower our high expectations for the future.

“Midlife essentially becomes a time of double misery, made up of disappointments and evaporating aspirations. Paradoxically, those who objectively have the least reason to complain (e.g., if they have a desirable job) often suffer most. They feel ungrateful and disappointed with themselves particularly because their discontent seems so unjustified – which creates a potentially vicious circle.”

Boy, that hits home.

A midlife reversal.

Here’s where the research gets interesting and (thankfully) very encouraging.

On average, according to the German data, life satisfaction forecasts finally line up with reality in our mid-50s. Perhaps 30 years of reality finally sink in.

From then on, we still fail to accurately forecast our future life satisfaction.

This time, we underestimate how positive our future will be.

“People come to terms with how their life is playing out. At the same time, the aging brain learns to feel less regret about missed chances, as brain studies have shown. This combination of accepting life and feeling less regret about the past makes life satisfaction increase again.

“And since people over 50 tend to underestimate their future satisfaction, these increases come as an unexpected pleasant surprise, which further raises satisfaction levels,” says Schwandt.

Here is what all that data looks like from Schwandt’s analysis of the German data.

The green circles show predicted life satisfaction in five years (time+5) on a scale from zero to ten. Optimism peaks at the age of 23.

The red squares show reported current-day life satisfaction.

You can see that actual life satisfaction (red dots) declines from your 20s to mid-50s. Then, it rises again through about age 75.

The U-shaped curve of life satisfaction.

The red squares in the chart above show that life satisfaction takes on a U-shape.

Schwandt’s research is not unique.

This U-shaped data contour pops up over and over again in studies of wellbeing.

In the 1990s, David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick analyzed surveys of life satisfaction worldwide. They were the first to observe the U-shape curve of wellbeing as we age.

They examined data from 500,000 Americans and Western Europeans, research in East European, Latin American, and Asian nations, and data from 72 developed and developing countries.

⁠“Whatever sets of data you looked at,” Blanchflower said in an interview with Jonathan Rauch, “you got the same things.” As Rauch explains, “Life satisfaction would decline with age for the first couple of decades of adulthood, bottom out somewhere in the 40s or early 50s, and then, until the very last years, increase with age, often (though not always) reaching a higher level than in young adulthood. The pattern came to be known as the happiness U-curve.”

Researchers even found the U-shaped curve in primates. 🐵

Caretakers for over 500 chimpanzees and orangutans completed a questionnaire rating their wellbeing. The apes’ wellbeing bottomed out at the ape equivalent of 45-50.

“Our results imply that human wellbeing’s curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its origins may lie partly in the biology we share with closely related great apes,” the research concluded.

Mountains vs. valleys.

Last week, in writing about the History of the Midlife Crisis, I suggested the classic midlife crisis sees the first half of life as an exciting ascent—building careers, families, and identities. The so-called crisis emerges from the realization of pending mortality and the steady descent from the midlife mountaintop. It might sound like, “Life is all downhill from here, and not in a good way."

The U-shaped wellbeing curve presents a different reality.

It shows wellbeing declining steadily in the first half of life before rebounding.

This positions midlife—the years you and I, and many of our friends, are living through now—in a far brighter light.

As Rauch observes, “⁠What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom.”

Hey - one final thing: thank you for reading my newsletter. It’s cool of you.

See you in a week.

Kevin